“I don’t have a headache. Don’t argue with me, Alix. I’m going.”
“Then I’ll go with you. I’ll drive—”
“No you won’t. I told you, it’s between Novotny and me. You’re staying here, behind locked doors.”
“I can’t stay here, not with those rats—”
“They’re gone, they can’t get back in the house. You’ll be all right. Just don’t answer the phone.”
“Jan…”
But he was at the door, through it, gone into the mist.
She ran out after him, caught up near the garage. “Please don’t go. Please!”
“Go back inside. You’ll catch cold out here.”
“I won’t let you go—”
“You won’t stop me. Go back inside.”
The look he gave her froze her in place; he moved on to the garage. Even in the foggy dark, it was unmistakable-a look of resolve and the kind of savage fury she’d seen when he was beating the rat to death. Chills rode her back and shoulders. She couldn’t move even as she heard the car start, saw him back it out and the lights come on. Couldn’t move as he drove out through the gate and fog swallowed the car. The last she saw of it was its taillights glowing bright red. Like the rat’s eyes in the cloakroom just before it died.
Hod Barnett
Hod didn’t like it. He just didn’t like it.
Taking a few potshots at the Ryersons’ station wagon, that was one thing. Even putting some shit down their well-no big deal. But the rats… that was an ugly thing, there wasn’t any call for that kind of thing. Big ones, too, seven or eight of them. And half-starved. Mitch had got a couple of kids to trap them; the Stedlow place was crawling with the buggers, with old man Stedlow dead a year now and his kin just letting the house and barn go to ruin. Rats like that, who the hell knew what kind of disease they might be carrying? Suppose one of them bit Ryerson or his wife?
Not that anybody would say he’d had anything to do with it. It was Mitch’s idea, and Adam had taken the cage full of rats out there tonight. All he’d done was tell Mitch he’d seen the Ryersons leaving town, driving off toward Highway 1 about four o’clock. He hadn’t even known about the rats until after Adam got back. Mitch hadn’t said anything to him while they were shooting pool in the Sea Breeze earlier.
Mitch and Adam were still in there, playing Eight Ball for beers against a couple of fellows from the cannery. Cracking jokes, laughing it up, Adam hippety-hopping around like he had a stick up his ass and he was trying to shake it loose. It got on Hod’s nerves; that was why he’d up and left a couple of minutes ago. It was like something had happened to the two of them, changed them. Mitch especially. Sure, Ryerson had run Red down and then threatened to have Mitch arrested on account of his car getting shot up. But that wasn’t cause to go putting a bunch of filthy rats in the lighthouses, right there in the pantry with all their food-Jesus! — and maybe giving Ryerson or his wife some kind of disease. It just wasn’t right.
Sitting there on the front seat of his old Rambler, Hod thought maybe he ought to go out to the lighthouse, do something about those rats before it was too late. But hell, it was after ten now; chances were the Ryersons had come back long ago and it was already too late. And even if it wasn’t, what if he went out there and tried to do something, and they came back and caught him? They’d think he was the one who brought the goddamn rats, not that he was trying to get rid of them. Besides, what could he do? He wasn’t about to go up against seven or eight half-starved rats loose in a little pantry, maybe get bitten himself. He hated rats. He didn’t want anything to do with the buggers.
Didn’t want anything to do with Mitch’s campaign against the Ryersons, either. Didn’t want to know anything else Mitch and Adam decided on doing, not before and not after. Tomorrow he’d tell them that, too, straight out. If anybody’s ass ended up in a sling, it wasn’t going to be Hod Barnett’s.
He started the Nash and drove on up the hill. When he walked into the trailer Della was sitting in the kitchen, smoking like a chimney and reading one of those silly damn romance novels she got from old lady Bidwell. Passion’s Tempest. Jesus Christ. But he knew better than to say anything to her about it.
She’d only start in again about how they didn’t have a TV set anymore and she had to have some pleasure in her life, didn’t she? — all that crap he’d heard a hundred times before.
She said, “Well, where’ve you been?” but not as if she cared much.
“Where do you think?”
“Over at the Sea Breeze running up your bar tab, like usual.”
“Don’t start in. I had three beers, all on Mitch.”
“Where’d he get money to throw away on you?”
“I said don’t start in. Boys asleep?”
“They’re in bed.”
“Mandy?”
“She’s not hem.”
“Where the hell is she, this late?”
“Out. She wouldn’t say where she was going.”
“I told her not to go running around after dark, after what happened to that hitchhiker last week. Damn it, I told her.”
“She wouldn’t listen to me, either.”
“You know where she is, don’t you? Off with that long-haired punk from Bandon again, that’s where. Spreading her legs for him in the backseat of his jalopy.”
Della glared at him. “I don’t like that kind of talk. You know I don’t.”
“Think she hasn’t been going down for him? Think she’s still a sweet little virgin?”
“You’ve got an ugly mouth, Hod Barnett.”
“No uglier than hers. Can’t tell me she hasn’t been acting funny lately, like she’s hiding something. You know what I think?”
“I don’t care what you think.”
“I think she got herself knocked up,” Hod said, “that’s what I think.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
“Why the hell should I like it?”
“Then she’d have to get married and move out and you’d have one less mouth to feed.”
“Ahhh…”
Hod went over to the refrigerator. He felt like eating something, but there wasn’t anything to eat. Not even a slice of bread or some milk left. No use saying anything about that to Della, either; no damn use saying anything anymore.
He slammed the refrigerator door, and when he turned around she had her nose buried in the romance book again. What did she get out of reading that crap? Did she think some Prince Charming was going to come along and take her off somewhere, a bag like her? She hadn’t been bad looking twenty years ago, when he’d met her down in Oklahoma after his Army discharge at Fort Sill. But now look at her. Letting herself go the way she had… he could barely stand to put his hands on her, even in the dark. Sometimes he wondered why he’d married her in the first place.
In the living room, he kicked Jason’s busted-up Mr. T doll off his chair-damn kid, always leaving his toys lying around-and sat down. The Coos Bay paper was on the floor next to the chair where Della had thrown it. All wrinkled and torn, as usual-she kept right on doing that to the paper even though she knew it drove him crazy. He picked it up and got it straightened out and glanced through it.
Another story about the young college girl they’d found on the cape last week. (Why wouldn’t Mandy listen to what she was told? What was the matter with that kid?) Still nothing new about who’d strangled her; they didn’t even have a suspect. Mitch thought it might be Ryerson, but Hod didn’t believe that for a minute. If Ryerson had done it, the state troopers would’ve arrested him by now, wouldn’t they? Sure they would have.
They weren’t stupid. Mitch was hipped on the subject of Ryerson. Just plain hipped on driving him out of the lighthouse, out of Oregon and back to California where he belonged. He’d probably do it, too, sooner or later, one way or another. If those rats didn’t work, he’d come up with something etse-something even worse, maybe, something Hod didn’t even want to think about.